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Author's reply

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Allan Beveridge*
Affiliation:
Queen Margaret Hospital, Whitefield Road, Dunfermline KY12 0SU, UK. Email: allanbeveridge@nhs.net
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Abstract

Type
Columns
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2011 

I would like to make the following points. First, in referring to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, which is regarded by most commentators as a novel, I was challenging the author's contention that: ‘From the eighteenth century through to the nineteenth, novels were realist by nature […] from the 1950s, however, novels began to move in mysterious ways. Suddenly “Multivoiced” narratives, unreliable narrators, allegories, genre dodging, satire, and allusiveness […] became the order of the day’ (Clarke,1 pp. 11–12). Sterne's Tristram Shandy, written in the 18th century, and James Hoggs’ The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, written in 1824, experiment with the genre and with the notion of the unreliable narrator. Indeed, Clarke himself (p. 17) cites Ford Madox Ford's 1915 novel The Good Soldier as representing a good example of an unreliable narrator.

Second, in his letter the author states that he did not identify psychoanalysis as a dominant force in the 1930s, but in his book he writes: ‘Psychoanalysis was a major force in English psychiatry during the 1930s’ (p. 150).

Third, as regards disparaging remarks about psychiatry, the quote about the smugness of male psychiatrists comes directly from the author, not from a novel. Elsewhere we find other critical remarks. Commenting on psychiatric training the author states: ‘three years of preparation for membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists […] requires not a whit of training in interpersonal relations, little of self-reflection, or what it means to be human. Such diversions might inhibit the self-assuredness provided by a medical model of madness. Alternatively, of course, the hyped confidence may simply compensate for the psychiatrists’ self-perceived fragility compared with the knowledge basis and status of other medical specialities’ (p. 147).

Finally, with reference to a dismissive approach to major thinkers, the author discusses what he calls ‘Socrates’ infamous claim that no one can knowingly do wrong’, and concludes: ‘Perhaps Socrates got it wrong’ (p. 156). He writes that ‘Although Nietzsche's Superman (Ubermensch) was realised most horrifically, in our own time, by the Nazis, the impulse to stomp on others continues’ (p. 136). He also observes: ‘Foucault foolishly suggests abandoning rationality itself’ (p. 186).

References

Edited by Kiriakos Xenitidis and Colin Campbell

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